How Ravi Zacharias’ Sin Explains the Need for Fasting

There are three important things to remember about Christianity when you hear revelations like we’ve recently heard about Ravi Zacharias.

1. Christianity has an incredible academic pedigree and a philosophical-theological-apologetic tradition that is highly intellectually stimulating and, to many people, satisfying.
2. Christianity presents a beautiful call to care for others in charity and compassion.
3. Christianity demands rigorous and harsh self-denial to the point of mortification.

These can’t be separated from Christianity as it is presented in the Bible, but they can be separated in our own lives and in our practice. This is probably why, in the famous thirteen chapter of 1 Corinthians, Paul indicates that it’s possible to “fathom all mysteries and knowledge” and “give all I possess to the poor” while still not having love.

After all, the third part is the hard part. It’s the part that isn’t fun. It doesn’t bring the same rewarding feeling that winning a debate or blessing someone’s life does. So, unfortunately, it’s all too easy to let that part slip while genuinely devoting yourself to the other two. And, besides, most of us are a mixture of light and dark, anyways. We may genuinely love doing the good of intellectual formation and service to our brothers and sisters–after all, we are still oriented towards good in our nature–but also not exactly warm up to denying our impulses and desires. The light that was separated from darkness on the first day mingles in our hearts. That’s why they’re messy.

We now know Ravi Zacharias was an adulterer and a sexual predator. We already had clues about this from before his death, but RZIM has now verified it all. This comes almost exactly a year after L’Arche revealed that its own investigations showed that its founder, Jean Vanier, was similarly predatory towards women in his spiritual care. In both cases, the shock (for those who are shocked) does not come so much from the fact that these men could commit grave sin–or, at least, it shouldn’t. What is so horrifying is that, to their followers, they seemed to speak with such wisdom and eloquence about the faith, and seemed so honestly pastoral towards others (Zacharias was buried in a coffin built by Angolan prisoners he had been ministering to), and yet at the same time could also be monsters who abused and took advantage of the weak. It throws all the seeming good they did into question. (This is no excuse for the toxic cover-up culture that existed within the RZIM board, which deserves every scrutiny and criticism, but it does help us to understand why it might have existed: Trying to confront this seeming contradiction could well have been too difficult and frightening for those who felt Zacharias had touched their lives.)

Ravi Zacharias’ coffin.

But it can simultaneously be true that Zacharias was intellectually persuaded of the truth of Christianity and passionately wanted others to believe in it, too, and that he genuinely cared for believers in a shepherding and selfless way, and that he was also a sexual profligate who didn’t want to deny his own urges. (The same can be true of Vanier, with his doctorate in Aristotelian philosophy and his, by all accounts, completely unfeigned concern for the developmentally delayed.)

Not every sexual predator is Jimmy Saville, perversely using seeming good deeds as a hunting ground for victims. Sometimes people fathom all mysteries and give all they have to the poor, but don’t have love.

But, of course, these things are never hermetically sealed from each other. You can’t hold fast to a belief in the truth of Scripture and also cheat on your wife without these two incongruities scraping up against each other in your mind. There are different ways to deal with this. One is to simply admit to yourself that you’re a hypocrite and you know that what you’re doing is wrong, but you don’t care and are going to do it anyways. (This is the situation of Dr. Tom More, the “bad Catholic at the end of the world” in Walker Percy’s novel Love in the Ruins.) Another is to try to rationalize your behaviour in the light of your professed beliefs.

Apparently, Zacharias did the latter, telling the women he used that he was like one of the Biblical patriarchs whom God had willed to have multiple sexual partners. Did Zacharias really believe this? Was it something he tried to persuade women to believe so that they would gratify his lust, or to make himself sound greater than he was, like he did when he inflated his academic credentials? Was it something he was trying to persuade himself to believe?

There is no way to be sure, and it doesn’t really matter, but it does put me in mind of Bardaisan, the Syrian theologian from the second and third centuries. Bardaisan was a convert from Babylonian astrology, a deeply educated and intelligent presbyter who, like Zacharias, wrote apologetic dialogues; his were on topics like free will and refuting the Marcionites, and his arguments were used by subsequent theologians, even those who otherwise denounced him. Although he renounced astrology, he remained an expert in astronomy and his research was used by the Church for generations afterwards, as was a coded alphabet he created for the purpose of writing ciphers in multiple languages. He also invented Syriac hymnody, writing 150 poems (an allusion to the Psalter). To strengthen the connection to Zacharias (or, at least, to explain why my mind made such a connection), he was an expert in Indian culture and religion, meeting with Brahmin and Jain representatives and writing a now-lost book on the subject. At the end of his life, he was boldly willing to die as a martyr under the tyranny of the emperor Caracalla.

Bardaisan, “Son of the Daisan River” (154-222)

Yet, despite all this, Bardaisan was also known to hold heretical views similar to the Gnostic heresies of Valentinus, prompting St. Ephraim of Syria to write against him. (Apparently, Ephraim started writing hymns as a way of combatting Bardaisan’s hymns, and only started gaining success against him when he did so.) And I cannot help but wonder if this wasn’t related somehow to his personal lifestyle. Like many theologians, Bardaisan was well-educated and came from a respectable background, but unlike them, he did not become an ascetic. Despite being a presbyter, he continued to live in the world: He sired three children and was known for relishing “the finer things.” Ephraim disparagingly describes how Bardaisan loved to bedeck himself in luxuriant clothing, like robes with crystals woven into them. Julius Africanus, who knew him personally, recounts how Bardaisan would go hunting and display incredible marksmanship with his bow: At one point, he had a boy hold up a shield for him at a distance, and he fired arrows into the shield until he had drawn an outline of the boy’s face. (This also implies a touch of pride in this well-dressed, high-cultured thinker.)

Is there anything wrong with being this worldly and debonair? Not necessarily, but it does suggest a possible lack of self-denial and self-mastery, and, when we’re talking about a pastoral intellectual who also commits a grave heresy, we can’t afford to ignore how their intellectual and moral failures could be linked to their possible failure to take up Christ’s cross. No matter how wonderful you are to others, or how studious you are towards Christian thought, if you don’t allow the Spirit to lead you rather than the flesh, your sin and your concupiscence will damage you in your relationships and impair your thinking–to the detriment of you and to those around you.

As I write this, Catholics are beginning the season of Lent. We begin with Ash Wednesday, when we abstain from meat, cover our head with ashes, and begin fasting as we reflect on the fact of our inevitable death. The goal is to die to ourselves now, so that, when we come to our physical death, we avoid the second death. This may seem morbid; we may want to focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, on the beauty of holiness and our Christological humanism, and so we should. But we should also never lose sight of the fact that sin is abhorrent and insidious and we need to hate it so much that we are willing to deny ourselves to the point of suffering in order to avoid it. The Church tries to help us recognize this with a penitential season, but, ultimately–as Bardaisan himself understood–we each have free will. We have to be the ones to choose to cooperate with the grace God offers. We need to look, hard, at the dark part of our heart and let harsh and painful light of Heaven shine into it.

Ravi Zacharias, like Jean Vanier, celebrated the attractive aspects of Christianity without finally mortifying himself from lust. May his grotesque example be a warning (and, in some somber way, an encouragement) to all of us this Lent. May we always remember that light and darkness sometimes flow from the same source; maybe, if we can keep this in mind, we won’t have more of these neurotic and spiritually deadly cover-ups that we’ve witnessed far too many times from people protecting their heroes. And–as Isaiah tells us–since the point of fasting is also to help the oppressed, let us also not forget to pray for the women he manipulated and the people harmed by the institutional protection of his sin. Lord, have mercy.